trains are my new best friend

helloooooo,

let me first say i love you and i miss you.

of course i miss you and i love you but who wouldn't.

but furthermore i will admit to maybe getting a little homesick MAYBE or maybe its just a case of slight melancholy.

yesterday i turned on the tv for the second time since ive been here (the first time was because i was reading a book and it was scary so i turned on the tv to occupy my mind and sat in bed watching japanese commercials for a while... note commercials are ten times more entertaining in japan) and i have never been so happy to see harry potter in my life. an english speaking harry potter that is. also titanic was on in english but i chose harry potter wanting something a little less dramatic. im not sure which one it was actually i think it was called harry potter and the chamber of secrets cause thats where they were going and there was this ghost boy named tom riddle who was actually voldermort and he brainwashed ron's little sister ginny into opening the chamber of secrets through this diary but harry potter made everything better so it was ok. i'm not sure what number this one is and i was trying to remember if i read it cause i read up to number 4 or 5 or something but i couldnt remember cause what i remember of them is all mixed up together. anyways i was happy to watch it for a while anyways.

last last week week we had thursday off (march 20th) for the first day of spring (which is a national holiday as it should be being a very important day). on wednesday night i went with mamiko to the bar (the red spanky just accross from the school and the size of a shoebox) only intending to walk with her to keep her out of the rain because she forgot her umbrella and then i said i would come in for a second and then i stayed until 3am. it was good. i added a picture of the bartender,he's really funny and nice, and gets really nervous when he tries to speak english it's funny. and mamiko's boyfriend was there and a bunch of their friends so i got introduced to a bunch of people. mamiko chose drinking and taking an early bus to her meeting in the morning to going home sober so they stayed until around 1am i think and then i just hung around the bar drinking with some people they intorduced me to. one lady was a "teacher of nurses" and spoke some english so we talked and she was really nice.

i woke up to see the sunrise on thursday and here i admit to maybe feeling a little homesick or something of the sort. but then i decided to go to sannomiya and eat cake. im collecting cafes... where i can go and read a book and drink tea (i drink milky tea now) and eat cake or some such sugary confection. i wanted cheescake so that was my intention. i took the train to sannomiya. exploring makes everything better. exploring something new makes everything happy and good again. i walked to motomachi in kobe just beside sannomiya and found a road named Tor road. Kobe is at the foot of a big mountain more flat and sloping than tall. it reminded me a little bit of san francisco because of the hills there were some trollys (but they were on wheels and just for tourists i think). so although i only intended to walk for a little bit and see what was up there i walked all the way up to the base of the mountain where there were only a few houses. it was good, i think it a fancy part of kobe because there was a really fancy little brown brick hotel that wasnt very big but had gold lettering named kobe hotel and in front on it there were four men with fine black suits and crisp white shirts and smooth black umbrellas rolled tighly and clasped with gold buttons and they acted like they were very important business men and owned the world although i probably just imagined they did although im pretty sure that that one sitting in the fancy black taxi cab with the driver with the white gloves had a smug look on his face. there were lots of houses and further up the mountain they were quite fancy with cameras and such. and there was an international school, and fancy bakeries, and somewhere that claimed to be Kobe's new cultural centre and the perpetuator of the new Kobe brand which sounded pretty silly to me. it was a nice walk, i was pretty happy with it. there was a french or italian coffee shop that smelled really good but i was dirty and it looked pretty spiffy so i didnt go in but i definatly wnat to go back and add it to my collection. they seem to be completely smitten with the english and french here. i was walking around in the bottom of sutty and there were all these english and parisian style bakeries and sweets shops and in one all the girls were even wearing the french maid costumes or maybe english that are all black and white and frilly and everywhere the pastry shops and bakeries are always english or french... never japanese hmmmmm. and if you buy soft cookies they are always american country kitchen style. and you've heard about those cafes in tokyo that you can go to where the waitress is a like a french maid and is said to attend to you in all sorts of ways that a maid may be imagined to... its quite scandalous.

anyways after my tor road excursion i was much happier and i decided to walk around some more. so i walked in straight lines remembering not to get lost and keeping the station in mind and in motomachi i found chinatown!!!! it was magnificant there were looming red gates and yellow laterns and a festival sorts with a million little food stands and people doing chinese dances and a million people and i loved it. for some reason i found the existance of a chinatown in japan very comforting. i guess because i love chinatown in toronto and it made me feel like it was home and i think i miss the fact that in toronto there are lots of different people and here there are pretty much only japanese people. it wasnt very big, just a short road, but there were lots of stuff crammed into there and i ate everything that looked yummy not knowing what it was and not really caring. i ate dumplings with delicious things inside of an identity unknow, and yummy crispy spring rolls one with vegetables and lots of ginger and one with what i think is some kind of meat, and i ate these round flatish type dumplings with green vegetables that might have been green onions inside and i think pork. i was very happy... and satisfied. and the ramen looked really good but i wanted to save room for the cheesecake i was still intent of searching for. so after that i went to this cake shop that i had seen before and wanted to go to and had a pot of cafe au lait and strawberry cake layered with puffy pastry and custard and wipped cream... it was pretty special. i sat with my pot (it was crisp white china and in a cylindrical fluted shape although i much prefer the squat round pots that the tea comes in) and my nice white cup and saucer and drank my cups of cafe au lait and ate my cake slowly and read Alias Grace by Margret Atwood which i had brought with me in my suitcase... displacing much that some would consider more important but not me (i finished it today, there was a very strange twist of events that kept me up at night and now i am in the limborific waiting period that i have ordained necessary between books of a day because i dont want them to get mixed up in my head and i feel there needs to be proper time to process). after reading for a while i left and walked around the shops for a little while, went home, and got ready for another day at work.

last sunday (which would have been march 23rd) i decided to go to back to osaka by myself cause its always a more thorough wondering around by yourself and boys never let you do what you want. so i took the train (trains are my new best friend) to osaka... its about an hour from okubo and i always enjoy a train ride so it was good. i got to the train station and managed to find my way to the subway ok and get a ticket and make it back to yotubashi (which is only 4 stops from nishi-umeda the station by JR station) quite perfectly if i do say so myself and i recognized everything and it was all good. i wondered around the shops and walked around osaka for a good 7 hours and it was splendid. i was wondering back to yotubashi when i heard all these people yelling and there was a march going on with all these people holding signs and flags and stuff and a man gave me a flag and the were protesting china's occupation of tibet especially in light of recent events in Lhasa.it was pretty awsome. i was really happy and i walked along with them for a while (and i called david z and 3am your time and woke him up to tell him oops). i had dinner in this yellow painted vietnamese restaurant (maggie went to vietnam and she loved it and said it was her favorite place so i really want to go) and had a yummy plate of lots of little things including my favorite crunchy spring rolls and mango salad and a bowl of something that tasted like hot chocolate with some kind of strong alcohol in it. i set out to find my way back home around 7pm when it was already dark out. ok. we all know i have no sense of direction whatsoever. i only manage becasue i can remember what places look like and lots of little things that i can recognize and use to find my way back to places. but ive never been in osaka when its dark... well i was that one time when we went out but it was in a different part of osaka. and the streets off the main street where i was are very twisty and maze like. so i might have got a little bit lost. but its ok i remained calm wandered around for a while trying to find something i recognized failed and asked a nice man in a convenience store how to get back to nishi-umeda sation. he told me how to get back to yotubashi station and from there i was a-okay to get home. it was actually quite easy and i found my friend the wooden restaurant that was my marker. when i get to the station the ticket buying machines were different than the ones at JR and i couldn't figure it out but then i asked a lady and she was nice and she helped me and it was all good. so then i went home and saya (one of ayako's friends) called me and i had just missed her but i will go back.

last monday i went to fla with ayako and we learnt some new parts that i now have no recollection on and then we had lunch at a really good spanish restaurant where i had some very very yummy fish (it was some kind of white fish) on a bunch of green vegetables that might have been kale or broccalini or something like that and cherry tomatoes and these white vegetables which i think were root vegetables cause they had green tops and looked kind of like turnips. and before that they gave us this little antipesto salad thing laid out on a long white plate all pretty with ravioli and octopus and something else i can't remember that was very good. after that i went with ayako to buy some makeup she wanted at this place where that have a special machine to check the colour of your skin and the ratio of water to oil in your skin and stuff and then i went to buy an espresso machine for nami at starbucks (we gave it to her yesterday because it was her last day and she really liked it... it was made in italy i think its pretty spiffy). after that i met yuka at yet another starbucks where our language exchange turned into a psychology/philosophy lesson. yuka is writing her thesis and she wants to use some english books and translate them into japanese so we were reading this book together and it was all about this guys theory of the ego, soul, and spirit... or at least the part that we read, we only got through a few pages. it was pretty interesting stuff, i remember some of the stuff from other psych and philospohy classes, but its difficult language for an english spearker nevertheless an english as a second language speaker, so it was difficult to explain some of the words and concepts (although i will admit it was kind of fun trying) and i hope i got it right and didnt tell her the wrong thing. we talked for a while, went home on the train, i finished some props for classes and it was goodnight.

tomorrow steph is coming. arriving at 6:35pm at Osaka Kansai airport. i will take the train to sannomiya and a bus to the airport and pick her up and then we will come back and i will show her where i live now. im glad someone is coming from home. im excited to see her. i have to go back home and finish cleaning for her and set up her futon and make an extra key cause she's staying for a month. she is bring things in her suitcase for me from home. i think we are going to go to tokyo and disneyland. she bought a 7 day japanrail pass to explore. i think it will be good.

ok,

i love you,

see you later,

sam